Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is having a busy Monday, first with the release of the Nathan Wade testimony, and now with his scathing letter to the Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ) demanding answers about the DOJ’s apparent last-minute attempts to keep non-citizens on state voter rolls.
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As RedState has been reporting, the DOJ recently filed a lawsuit against Virginia and its governor, Glenn Youngkin, for having the nerve to follow a state law, which was approved by the DOJ itself in 2006, that removes self-identified non-citizens from the voter rolls. Glenn Youngkin did nothing but allow the standing law of eighteen years, which has been uneventfully overseen by both Democrat and Republican governors, do its thing and keep the voter rolls clean. Youngkin concluded that the politically-motivated DOJ filed the lawsuit with just a few weeks to go until Election Day because things are “getting tight” in the commonwealth.
In other words, Democrats have yet again weaponized the DOJ against their political opponents.
The DOJ’s effort to similarly intimidate voter roll cleaning efforts in his home state of Ohio clearly irked Jim Jordan, and you don’t want Jim Jordan irked at you. He’s smart, tenacious and he brings the receipts.
In a letter to Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Jordan, in his capacity as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, eviscerated Clark for the lawsuit filed by her office against Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose in which it’s alleged that LaRose’s efforts to clean the state’s voter rolls may violate federal law. Such lawsuits, Jordan maintained, were merely threats that are “baseless, contrary to established law, and a clear effort to intimidate and interfere in Ohio’s electoral process.”
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There’s a reason you don’t mess around with Jim Jordan and that’s because he will receipt you into oblivion.
In his letter to Kristen Clarke, Jordan cites all relevant case law and precedent, just blowing away the DOJ’s efforts to rig the election for Democrats.
The Constitution empowers states to serve as the primary administrators of elections. In fact, the Supreme Court has recognized that states have broad authority to “enact reasonable regulations of parties, elections, and ballots to reduce election-and campaign-related disorder.” While the federal government plays a supporting role, Congress has passed laws to improve election integrity and bolster voting rights. In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to ensure that only eligible citizens participate in federal elections and allow states to maintain accurate voter rolls.
In addition, Congress has made it a crime for any noncitizen to vote in a federal election. These laws complement the states’ primary authority to regulate elections and support what the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called the states’ “historical power to exclude aliens from participation in [their] democratic political institutions.”
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Seems pretty cut and dried, but Jordan wasn’t done.
Like other states, Ohio’s Constitution explicitly prohibits noncitizens from voting in its elections. Therefore, under Ohio law, noncitizens have never been “eligible” voters, and their registration has been invalid from the beginning. In other words, the NVRA “does not apply to removing an improperly registered noncitizen.” Under his authority as Ohio’s chief election officer, Secretary LaRose has tried to ensure that eligible voters—and not ineligible noncitizens—participate in Ohio’s elections.
It’s clear that Kristen Clarke and her DOJ Civil Rights Division aren’t big on that whole “state’s rights” thing, thus their ham-handed efforts to intimidate states into not upholding their own laws. Ms. Clarke and her ilk seem to be more focused being political operatives than they are on upholding the rule of law, but, then again, her cushy DC job evaporates if Donald Trump lands back in the White House.
Jordan has a few demands of the clearly-weaponized DOJ:
1. All documents and communications referring or relating to the Ohio Secretary of State’s efforts to verify the citizenship status of registered Ohio voters, for the period of May 1, 2024, to the present; and
2. All documents and communications between or among the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, or any component entities within the two departments, referring or relating to the Ohio Secretary of State’s efforts to verify thecitizenship status of registered Ohio voters, for the period of May 1, 2024, to the present.
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Ms. Clarke has until 5:00 p.m. on October 31, 2024 to furnish Jordan’s committee with the requested documents.
We’ll just leave you with this: